Why?
Rate limiting an API is often required to ensure that clients do not abuse the available resources and that the API is reliably available when multiple clients are requesting data concurrently. Buckets can be created based on various parameters of an incoming request (eg. Authorization, IP address) to configure how requests are grouped for limiting.

Rate limiting functionality is already available in some proxies (eg. Nginx, HAProxy). However, they often use in-memory stores that make rate-limiting when running multiple proxies (e.g. for load balancing) unpredictable. Configuration for these limits also gets complex since it includes many actions such as routing, request/response re-writing, and rate-limiting.

Sphinx is not...
Sphinx is not focused on preventing Denial of Service (DoS) attacks or requests from malicious clients. The goal is to expose rate limiting information to clients and enforce balanced use by API clients.

Sphinx is not a request forwarding service. Sphinx only allows for very simplistic forwarding to a single host per instance of the rate limiter. Any advanced routing or request handling should be handled by a real proxy (eg. Nginx, HAProxy).

Sphinx is not an HTTPS terminator. This keeps the burden of configuring SSL certificates and security outside of Sphinx. Ideally, there is real load balancing and HTTPS termination before a request hits Sphinx.

If you have been using DS Cloud to synchronise folders between your Android mobile phone and Synology NAS (on DSM6), you will be disappointed that DS Cloud is not supported on DSM7. The DS Cloud’s two-way folder synchronisation feature enabled me to free up storage space on the mobile by shifting dated files out of the Synology NAS sync-ed folder to another folder. This shift would appear as though the files were deleted on the server-side, prompting DS Cloud (on the mobile device) to delete off the files. It is a niffy trick to manage storage space on the mobile device but it no longer works on DSM7. Fortunately, I managed to replicate this two-way sync using FolderSync Android app and Synology’s WebDAV Server package. Continue reading the guide if you want to know how.

We have all experienced the limitations of the relational model and the operational burden of running a large fleet of databases. At PlanetScale, our vision is to build a database developers love without compromising on any of the database features required to run an application that can scale up as needed. To achieve this, we knew we needed a database engine with a track record of powering companies that deal with humongous amounts of data and traffic. That’s why we chose Vitess.

The dig command is an incredibly powerful tool for querying DNS records. Dig stands for Domain Information Groper and is the utility of choice for most DNS administrators working on Linux. It can be used to confirm DNS entries, get your public IP address from the command line, troubleshoot DNS issues and get information about a DNS zone.

Dig is part of the BIND (Berkely Internet Name Domain) software utilities (bind-utils). Although not installed by default, it is available on nearly all Linux distributions by installing the bind-utils package or Red Hat variants or dnsutils on Debian based distros.

Most of us use online services like Gmail, Dropbox, Skype, Evernote etc. on a daily basis without having control over the service. However, now it’s easier than ever to find a self-hosted alternative to your favorite online service and have complete control over it. In this article, we will share a huge list of self-hosted alternatives to popular online services.

Find alternatives to:
Google Analytics
WordPress, Joomla, Drupal
Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox
Gmail, Yahoo Mail
Google Reader, Feedly
Google Docs, Microsoft Office Online
Evernote, OneNote, Google Keep
Skype, Slack, HipChat
Trello
GitHub
Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Mozilla Thunderbird’s Calendar
Zendesk, UserVoice, Freshdesk
Disqus, Facebook Comments, IntenseDebate
Facebook, Twitter
Wikia, Wikipedia
Shopify, Gumroad, Sellfy
LastPass
Imgur, Flickr, ImageShack
SugarCRM, Zoho, Nutshell
TinyURL, goo.gl, CloudApp

One of the reasons why we love our servers (and we love them a lot!) is that everyone gets full root access. This means that you are in full control over your server while still having the dedicated, EPIC 24/7 support. You can install any software and application you want to. There are many options to choose from when it comes to self-hosted alternatives to hosted services. But first off, what are the differences?

A disclaimer: we may be a bit biased, as we really love and support the open source community. We are always open to criticism and suggestions, though. So let us know in the comments if there’s anything you think we should change.

Detailed statistics, charts & graphs
Data management for Memcached (full CRUD support)
Memcached cluster health dashboard
Memcached host dashboard
Update check
Nice & comfortable UI
Clean & well documented code
Responsive and mobile ready
Notice
This software is currently in early alpha state and so i want to warn - There is currently no ciritcal bug i know about but maybe still some potential for (Memcached) data loss - from my point of view its not critical in development cause it's a non-persistent memory store we're talkin about - but it's just fair to warn you before you use it! :)

Now that you have a VPS up and running smoothly, you want to keep in that way—or, at the very least, know if something goes wrong. Luckily, a huge variety of monitoring solutions exist to help give you a head’s up if an entire server crashes, a webapp is taking too long to respond, or you’re hitting your CPU limits.

Now, there are some truly excellent enterprise-level monitoring suites out there, if that’s of interest to you. We called out New Relic in the headline, as it’s one of the most popular monitoring solutions out there, but the competition is fierce, with other players like Pingdom, Twilio, and Stackify trying to get some of the monitoring marketshare. But even though many of these solutions have a free tier, we think it’s possible to get much of the same functionality without being boxed into a SaaS application.

With that said, we’re going to focus on open source, self-hosted alternatives that don’t cost you a penny.

It should be noted that not all of these applications perform the same function, or include the same features, so don’t think of this list as a side-by-side comparison between any of these 7 applications, or any of the other ones mentioned above.

Here’s some of our favorites.

Installing Tiny Tiny RSS for the first time
Upgrading Tiny Tiny RSS

wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage are open source (LGPLv3) command line tools to render HTML into PDF and various image formats using the Qt WebKit rendering engine. These run entirely "headless" and do not require a display or display service.

There is also a C library, if you're into that kind of thing.

How do I use it?
Download a precompiled binary or build from source
Create your HTML document that you want to turn into a PDF (or image)
Run your HTML document through the tool.
For example, if I really like the treatment Google has done to their logo today and want to capture it forever as a PDF:

wkhtmltopdf http://google.com google.pdf

Linux configuration, Automation, Security – Sysadmin/DevOps blog

These documents and tools were created by me while I worked at Verio as well as all the time since then. As such, there are still some references to "customers" and maybe even some procedures we used while I worked there. Since the content is just fine, just a bit weird to read, I haven't updated these and am focusing more on adding new content rather than fixing these "bugs".

If you are interested in seeing more content added to the site, and particularly if you have any topics you would like to see covered, then please let me know. I am interested in adding content/tools that will be read and used. So, anytime I run across stuff that I think is useful, I add it.

this document explains how to install and configure a Quake II (q2) dedicated server on a linux box. it is assumed that you :

• have root shell access to a linux box (remote or local)
• know some linux basics (installing software, ssh, ...)
• know some quake basics (config, mods, basic console commands, ...)
• want to install a quake server ;-)
• you have 'screen' installed on your server (simply install it if you don't have it)
• I'm using a debian server in this example but you should be able to adapt this to your favourite distribution easily
• we'll be installing a r1q2 server for security reasons here (Though this includes all steps necessary to install a normal q2 server and also leaves you with a ready-2-run normal q2 server, using the non-r1q2 server for an internet server is highly discouraged due to many security issues with the original q2 binary!)

The Quake II linux dedicated server HOWTO

this document explains how to install and configure a Quake II (q2) dedicated server on a linux box. it is assumed that you :

• have root shell access to a linux box (remote or local)
• know some linux basics (installing software, ssh, ...)
• know some quake basics (config, mods, basic console commands, ...)
• want to install a quake server ;-)
• you have 'screen' installed on your server (simply install it if you don't have it)
• I'm using a debian server in this example but you should be able to adapt this to your favourite distribution easily
• we'll be installing a r1q2 server for security reasons here (Though this includes all steps necessary to install a normal q2 server and also leaves you with a ready-2-run normal q2 server, using the non-r1q2 server for an internet server is highly discouraged due to many security issues with the original q2 binary!)

Please read my notes on security before making your server public.

GoAccess' dashboard gives you an overview of server metrics by displaying summaries of different reports as panels on a single scrollable view.

Cloud storage stands for virtualised pool of network storage most commonly hosted by third parties. Cloud storage is a network-based service which physically do not exist but remains somewhere in the cloud. To be more clear, cloud storage means sharing data over network, rather than having local servers or personal device.

Cloud storage is all around us in our smart phones, on desktops and servers etc. The Dropbox application which is now available on smart phone is nothing but cloud storage application. Google Drive is another cloud storage application which lets you store and access your stored data from anywhere and anytime.

This article aims at – Building your personal cloud storage using ownCloud application. But what is the need of building personal cloud when there are third party hosting. Well all the third party hosting limits you to work with the given configuration and storage limit. With the ever expanding list of photos, videos, mp3’s of storage is not sufficient, moreover cloud storage is a relatively new concept and there are not many third party cloud storage host and the available one is too much costly.

ownCloud community has recently released their special release ownCloud 8. They have come up with incredible changes in terms of quality, performance and innovations to provide excellent cloud experience with “ownCloud“. If you are already working with its older version, you’ll definitely experience significant improvements in Document handling.

An open source to do app for bookmarks. Made by Plain.

Speedy Sites: Nginx and PHP
20
FEB
In the previous article in this series, we looked at using Apache with mod_pagespeed to perform on-the-fly enhancements to decrease page load times. Getting an optimised page is only half the battle however; we need to ensure that our backend is doing as little work as possible in order to be highly scalable. In this article, we look at how we can achieve this while improving performance – all with nginx.

What is nginx?
For those unfamiliar with nginx, it describes itself as “a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy”, first released publicly in 2004, and becoming one of the most successful webservers in the past few years – their wiki has an impressive list of sites powered by it. The biggest advantage it has over the tried-and-tested Apache webserver is that it uses an event-driven, asynchronous architecture – so it doesn’t rely on threads to handle requests. What does this mean in real terms? Well, apart from predictable increases in memory usage under load, the key point for us at the moment is that it can serve static content fast. Really fast.

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool's data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.

Imagine that you have just written a post on your blog, tweeted about it and watched it get retweeted by some popular Twitter users, sending hundreds of people to your blog at once. Your excitement at seeing so many visitors talk about your post turns to dismay as they start to tweet that your website is down — a database connection error is shown.

The following notes provide details on the conversion of several repositories from subversion to git making use of two tools to help with the process:

gitolite which provides a framework to help managing a central git repository. From https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite
svn2git to convert existing repositories from subversion to git. From: https://github.com/nirvdrum/svn2git
This is the second time I performed such conversions and it was a lot easier the second time around due to greater familiarity with git and the tools being used to perform the conversion. These notes should make it even easier the next time I need to do this.